“I love being a frog in the warm sunny summer—”
-Frog in Willie and Robert Reale’s A Year With Frog And Toad, which adapts the books from Arnold Lobel
I’ve been thinking about heat lately—perhaps because the temperature keeps laughing past 90; perhaps because I’ve been remembering my time teaching in India, where the temperature kept laughing high numbers—and then my partner and I listened to A Year With Frog and Toad on a long drive. The heat washing down from the sky. The rain washing, too, though briefly, a flood across the windshield that dried a few minutes later. And my partner said, “There’s so much love for the everyday of life in this.” This the musical. We keep talking about it as something that’s going on. (It is, in my head, like the sun and the rain). This the drive together. This lounging on the couch now as the shade deepens toward evening. This being welcomed home as who you are, as Arnold Lobel was eventually welcomed home. Later his daughter Adrianne Lobel commissioned the play.
Jay Goede gives Frog his singing voice in the original Broadway cast. He swells up with “looovveee,” drawing it out. Holding it up. As if there’s as much of it as there is warm sunny summer. As, I suppose, there is. When I first heard the song I didn’t like it as much as some of the other numbers. I wondered if it was too much. I wasn’t sure what it was about. Now it’s been running through my head for days, delightfully. And I realize: oh, yes. It’s—in part, at least—about this.
Azlan Guttenberg Smith 